Day of the Dead (29 page)

She nodded, folded the envelope in half, and put it in the pocket of her shorts. Then she rose to leave.

He stood as well. ‘Now, you call me when you get there,' he said. ‘There's ETN buses going to Guadalajara from the main bus station all day – last one's not till after midnight. Just go and get on one.'

‘That's what I tried to do when I got off the boat today. It didn't quite work out.'

‘It'll work out this time.' He gave her a quick hug. ‘Try ditching him in the Costco.'

Now she did laugh. ‘Like, hide behind the paper towels?'

‘I'd go for the condiments aisle.'

She slung her purse on her shoulder. ‘Thanks, Charlie. Thanks for listening.'

‘Take care of yourself,' he said.

‘You, too.' She hesitated. ‘And … just take care.'

Maybe I shouldn't have come here, Michelle thought, picking her way down the darkened stairs. If Gary found out she'd been talking to Charlie …

Well, so what? she told herself. She was supposed to be ‘hanging tight,' wasn't she? Acting normal. Normal people went and visited friends, didn't they?

And she'd needed some help. Needed to talk to someone. Charlie wasn't going to have any problems just because she'd talked to him. Was he?

‘Jesus.'

She'd banged her shin on something – the old weight bench. She remembered it now from her first visit. It hadn't moved. Why would anyone leave a thing like that out on a landing, where it just sat and rotted and rusted? She'd hit her shin hard –
that
was going to leave a nice bruise.

A burst of laughter and a flicker of color from a television set in the next apartment. She flinched and kept walking. She should have thought more about it, at least, what the consequences of her unburdening herself might be, for Charlie.

When did I get to be so selfish? she wondered. Or maybe ‘selfish' wasn't the right word. So self-centered.

So oblivious.

She'd reached the street. It was close to 11:00
P.M
., and the night was quiet, the air sullen with clouds.

It was about a twenty-five-minute walk to Hacienda Carmen. She supposed she had to go back there. Anything else would look suspicious. I'll get an early start in the morning, she thought. Head north. Take just my hobo, the camera, and the money, leave everything else. Maybe even go to Costco first. Who knows, it could work.

She should find a cab. The walk would have been nice, a way to clear her head, but how many people had told her that it wasn't always safe here at night?

Charlie's building was on a hill, exiting onto a narrow lane that wound down to a broader avenue, where the taquería and other businesses were. She could probably find a cab down there. Here there was nothing but a few skinny buildings and a cement retaining wall pressed against a cut in the hill, crumbling from an onslaught of knobby roots that seemed to grip it like arthritic fingers.

She'd nearly reached the bottom of the block when something, a darker shape in the dark of a doorway, moved in a blur that caught the corner of her eye. She half-turned, and something whirred and slammed into her head, and everything exploded into red and white sparks, and she knew she was falling. Her hip, her shoulder, struck concrete, and she lay there for a moment on her back. She saw darkness above her, darkness that moved, a man crouching over her; she tried to hold the picture together, but it dissolved into sand, into nothing.

Bumpity-bumpity-bump.

There goes the train, over the hill.

Bumpity-bumpity-bump.

Here comes the car, out of the drive.

Sleeping in cars, that was the best. When she was little, dozing in the backseat at night, wrapped in her blanket, Maggie next to her, the wheels on the road, the hum and rumble of the engine. Sometimes she wanted to stay there forever, in the dark, always moving. She wished they'd never get home.

The blanket. She'd gotten tangled up in it somehow; it was in her mouth; she couldn't move. I have to move, I have to get up, she thought. We're almost there.

Bumpity-bumpity-bump.

Smell of raw gas. Of exhaust. Warm metal. Pressed into her cheek. Dark, all dark. A bump, a jolt. Her skull slammed against the metal. Pain echoed through her head like a struck drum, and there was something in her mouth – a washcloth, maybe. She couldn't spit it out, and for a moment she couldn't breathe. She tried to move, to sit up, to do something. Her hands – her hands were behind her back, tied there, she could feel the rough twine rubbing her wrists raw, and she thrashed around, struggling to draw in a breath, her chest aching from the strain, until finally she lay still.

Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.

A car trunk. She was in a car trunk.

What had happened?

She'd come out of Charlie's place, and something … some-one … Her head hurt. Someone had hit her.

Hit her and tied her up and locked her in the trunk of a car.

She screamed, once, twice, but with the cloth in her mouth it hardly made a sound. She kicked out with her feet, striking metal with her bare toes, and the pain from that was enough to make her stop. Think.

Did she want whoever was driving to hear her?

He was going to kill her.

She was sobbing now, and she told herself, I have to stop. I won't be able to breathe.

But he was going to kill her. How could there be any doubt? The way he'd hit her … He'd hit her
with
something. A blow like that, that could have killed her, and he didn't care.

Where was he taking her?

The car bounced and swerved, moving slowly. There was something else: a smell. What was it? She'd smelled it before.

Think. Think.

Her wrists were tied, but her feet weren't. She could run if she got the chance.

The car stopped. She lay there in the trunk, waiting. Lie still, she told herself. Don't move.

Spoiled babyfood. That was what it smelled like.

He was opening the trunk – she knew that from the click and creak of metal – and a little light came on inside the trunk. Don't look, she told herself. The man leaned in and scooped her up, grunting, like he was lifting a heavy sack of flour. She let herself go limp in his arms. Corpse Pose. Don't resist the pull of the earth.

He walked a few paces. Who was he? The policeman? Dark as it was, with her head purposefully lolling, eyes halfclosed, she couldn't really tell.

Abruptly, he released her, letting her roll off his arms. She cried out a little; she couldn't help it, the cry muffled by the cloth in her mouth. But the landing wasn't what she expected: The ground yielded.

Plastic bags. She'd landed on plastic bags. Fast-food wrappers and Styrofoam. Soiled napkins, plastic forks. Banana peels and melon rinds. Animal parts. A flapping of birds.

The dump. They were at the dump.

She lay there and didn't move.

The man walked away. She heard his footsteps, making soft hissing noises from the exhalation of air trapped in layer upon layer of plastic bags.

Was he leaving? Maybe he thought she was already dead, or dying.

She lifted up her head. She could see him lean over the open trunk of the car, pull something out, and in the light from the trunk she could see what it was. A baseball bat.

Now – move
now.
She rolled up to a sitting position, got to her knees, managed to stand, took a few staggering steps. He caught up to her easily. Her arm took the first blow, right above the elbow. She stayed on her feet, stumbled forward, and he swung again, and this time the bat smashed against her hip. She fell, landing on her side, but her legs kept moving, scrabbling through the plastic bags and garbage, her chin scraping on a dented can, and the bat struck again, hitting her shoulder, and she rolled onto her back, and she could see him standing over her, resting the bat on his shoulder.

She rolled over again, onto her side, then onto her stomach, too slowly, and the bat slammed against her ribs, and she rolled once more, and suddenly she was falling, falling into space, into nothing again.

There was a rush of birds crying out, beating their wings, feathers and claws brushing against her as she landed. She lay there, stunned. Took in what she lay on: stuffed garbage bags and cracked tires. From above she heard a bird scream, the man give a surprised shout, and then a chorus of barking dogs. She struggled to sit up, crawled on her knees, then half fell off the pile she'd landed on and crawled behind it. Crouched down. Could he see her? The dogs kept barking. A couple men, shouting at them. Then, finally, a car engine starting and the car driving away.

She stayed where she was. She thought she might pass out. It was so hard to breathe, and everything … everything hurt. Her head …

Just lie down. Just for a few minutes.

Then she heard the car engine and saw the headlights coming around the hill.

She burrowed into the garbage, curled herself into a ball. The car moved slowly down the road. She couldn't see it, couldn't see anything except the black garbage bags around her, but she could hear its low idle, the crunch of tires on dirt and gravel.

Had it stopped?

No. The car kept moving, slowly, until finally she couldn't hear it anymore.

She stood up, dizzy and shaking.

There was some light here, from a few utility lamps strung here and there on skinny poles, and ambient light from town, too. Not enough to see much about where she was, but enough to look up and have some idea how far she'd fallen. A story's worth, at least. Maybe two. The way she'd landed, on decades of garbage bags and tires, it was like one of those stuntpeople falling into an air mattress. If she hadn't been at a dump, she really would have been hurt.

That thought made her laugh.

Don't laugh, she told herself. You'll choke.

She had to get rid of the gag somehow.

She tried lying down again, thinking maybe she could bring her arms from behind her back under her legs, get them in front of her. She'd seen that done on TV, hadn't she?

The pain in her arm and shoulder sent a wave of white across her eyes, and for a moment she didn't know where she was. No use. The way her hands were tied, rope looped multiple times around her wrists and forearms, she couldn't do it.

She stood up again. It was harder this time.

In the dim, gray light, she made out a rectangular shape, large, tilted at an angle, about her height, just a few yards away. What was it?

A refrigerator. She moved toward it.

The doors had been removed. Where the bottom of the freezer door would have been attached, there was still a metal hinge, a blunted projection with a ragged hole where the bolt had once been.

Could that work?

She knelt down so the hinge was roughly even with her mouth. Came at it from the side, opened her mouth as wide as she could, pushed against the hinge, trying to catch it in the folds of the cloth, but it slid off. She tried again. Same result. And again.

She cried out in frustration but could barely make a sound. I just want to sleep, she thought. Curl up right here.

No, she told herself. No. You could die if you do that. Suffocate. Try again. One more time. Just try.

The hole in the hinge, she thought. It had sharp edges on it from where they'd pried out the bolt.

She tried to slide the hinge underneath the cloth. On the first attempt, she shoved the cloth in even farther. Gagged on it. Tried again. It moved but caught on her teeth. Again. This time she could feel the cloth catch, just a little. She opened her mouth so wide that her jaw hurt. A little more. Just a little more. The cloth moved, inch by inch.

And then it was out.

She fell back, gasping. The air was so sweet. Even the dump smells were beautiful.

She let herself lie there for a minute. Just to rest.

But I can't stay here, she thought vaguely. The man had left, but would he come back? Could he be looking for her now? Driving on the road that circled the dump? She hadn't thought of that.

A fresh rush of adrenaline got her to her feet.

Her feet. She'd lost her flip-flops at some point. It wasn't too bad at first – no cans or glass, that stuff had already been sorted and gleaned. But still she stepped on things, things that hurt, and she couldn't stop to look and see what they were. Animal bones, maybe. Shards of hard plastic.

She picked her way through the bags and tires, trying to find some kind of path. Her hip was stiffening up; every step on that side sent bolts of pain shooting down her leg, and she hadn't gone very far before she lost her balance and fell. She didn't know if she could stand up again, with her hip like that, without her arms to aid her, with no firm surface.

Use your core! Use your core!
She'd had a trainer once who said that nearly every set, regardless of the exercise, and Michelle heard her voice now.

She'd never liked that trainer.

Somehow she stood.

The third time she fell, she thought, That's it. I can't do it. Maybe she could lie there for a while. Maybe in the morning someone would find her. Someone who could help.

She thought about that some more. Remembered the first time she'd come here, the buzzard sitting on the cow head, picking at the hide and the scraps of flesh the butchers had left. That's what the man had wanted for her. He'd wanted to beat her to death and throw her body over the side, into the garbage, for the birds to eat.

Well, fuck that.

Use your core!

She stood.

She just had to get to the road. It wasn't too far. She risked running into the man in the car, she knew that, but it had been a while now, and he hadn't come back, and she knew she could not continue much longer through this landscape of garbage bags and abandoned couches.

She could see the road, just over a ridge of trash.

Only a few more steps. Past the crumpled baby carriage. Around the torn mattress, bleeding springs and stuffing.